Banned Books Week runs from September 24th through October 1st, and is enjoying its 30th annual celebration this year. The event was founded in 1982 by librarian and director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom Judith Krug.

To celebrate the week, a tribute to the authors and literature that have been the targets of censors, colleges and libraries in the U.S. are hosting readings of banned works.

Across the nation, readers are tucking in to some of history’s most famous banned works, including Ulysses by James Joyce, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (challenged as late as 2009), The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Animal Farm by George Orwell, and The Awakening by Kate Chopin.

Since the creation of Banned Books Week, more than 11,000 works have been challenged, according to the American Library Association, the sponsor of the week. Few challenges lead to outright bans, but the act of challenging the appropriateness of books has not died out. Yahoo! notes the following texts were challenged in the past 12 months:

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Challenged for passages explicitly dealing with teen sex, homosexuality and bestiality.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Challenged due to complaints about sexual and homosexual themes.

Push by Sapphire (Ramona Lofton)
Challenged for the numerous adult situations described in the novel, including rape, incest and child abuse.

What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras and Dane Saavedra
Banned from 21 Buda, Texas, school libraries due to definitions of rape, incest, sexual assault and intercourse.

Are you planning on reading a banned book this week? Let us know!

Banned Books Week Celebrates 30th Anniversary is a post from: The Inquisitr

…sometimes it’s kind of depressing.

[via Digg]

Irony… is a post from: The Inquisitr

Today Amazon basically told every single Kindle owner that they don’t really own anything that they buy through the company. As far as Amazon is concerned they have complete say on whether or not you can keep a book you thought you paid for.

Think not?

Well think again because as any Kindle owner who had paid good money for an electronic copy of George Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm found out this morning this isn’t the case. This happened because the publisher of the two books decided that they didn’t want to make electronic versions of the books available after all and applied pressure on Amazon to fix the problem.

The fix of course was to delete all downloaded versions of the books from people’s Kindles. Granted their accounts were credited with what the books had cost but that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve just been told we don’t really own anything we buy in digital form – especially when the seller has a direct way to delete that product.

As David Pogue wrote in a post today

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

It is this kind of thing that leads me to believe that the more we move into the cloud the less we will actually ever own anything anymore.

And they wonder why piracy lives on is a post from: The Inquisitr